If you want an interesting/exotic AIX machine, I think the Apple Network Servers will fill the bill. They only run their tweaked version of AIX 4 (you can coerce them into running Linux or NetBSD, but that's dull, man!), they're really nice looking machines and they are cantankerous enough to be fun to mess with. Most people dump them when they find out they won't run Mac OS (or at least won't run without a lot of extremely tedious work, and then won't run well). This E-mail comes to you from an ANS 500 with a 200MHz card, which has been my favourite ornery beast since 1998 and has run continuously since then. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "The ants are my friends/They're blowing in the wind" ----------------------

--- Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Nah, not me. I'm too much of a die hard. Frankly can't even say why I'd like to explore the more *esoteric* UNIX flavas out there (especially considering the "bad press" I've been getting regarding UX, AIX,..). Correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't the first machine to run AIX the IBM/RT's? Googling... ____________________________________________________________________________________ Building a website is a piece of cake. Yahoo! Small Business gives you all the tools to get online. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting

On Sep 4, 2007, at 12:48 AM, Jochen Kunz wrote: You're thinking of AOS (Academic OS). AIX was from the earliest days derived from Interactive's IN/ix, which IBM claims was "the first commercial UNIX." ok bear

On Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:36:12 -0400 Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote: Ohh, I didn't know that there was a version of AIX for the RT. I allways thought there was only BSD for the RT. -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

On Monday 03 September 2007 13:50, Liam Proven wrote: POWER is an inherently interesting processor architecture (especially the 6-chip versions), and the machines are built like a tank - even the models with a plastic case are practically bulletproof. POWER is amazingly zippy for the relative clock speed, especially for floating point ops... And, AIX, well, if you've ever tried to admin an AIX box, I don't see how you could say it wasn't "unique" especially among UNIX variants. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

On 03/09/07, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote: I have a number of PowerMacs for that side of things. :?) Only done a tiny bit of /very/ basic stuff, but mostly, I only keep machines around that I have some *use* for, unless they're something RS/6000s were impressive but I never really wanted one and I have no conceivable use for one now! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On 03/09/07, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote: Arguably, this may be so, but I'd submit two rather important riders on to that. [1] Whereas this was the case with the 601/603/604 and so on, I'm not sure it's really true any more. The "G5" is pretty much a 2-core POWER4, AIUI [2] All the interesting apps and the desktop-relevant stuff is on PowerPC. Specifically, on OS X. Even a 10y old G3 Mac with OSX makes a pleasant and usable machine for the Web today and for day-to-day use. I can't think of a lot of use for a 10yo RS/6000 except as a server - as a workstation running Motif or something, it wouldn't be much use on the desktop today. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On Monday 03 September 2007 17:41, Liam Proven wrote: As I've read, the 601 is more POWER than the rest of the PPC chips. Still much slower and dumbed down than the proper POWER (non-PC) versions. And you have that backwards, the G5 is 1/2 of a POWER4 chip. I guess a dual-core G5 is close to a POWER4, but it's still lacking some things, like cache. And, the G5 has VMX/Altivec, which the POWER4 doesn't. Mostly, the POWER4 was designed to be a enterprise server grade CPU, and the G5 is designed to be a consumer-grade CPU. There's a lot of trade-offs that they made when designing one vs the other. I guess that a POWER3 is technically also a "PowerPC 630", but no resemblance to the PPC60x series of chips. The POWER5 and POWER6 are quite a bit more interesting than any PowerPC chip. Interesting depends on what you mean by it. POWER has AIX and i5/OS / OS/400. by themselves, much more interesting to me than anything that runs on MacOSX. Of course, I'm "one of those people" who runs Linux on their work-provided PowerMac G5. I just can't seem to get my boss to want to pay $10k for a proper POWER5 workstation from IBM. ;) Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

On Monday 03 September 2007 23:18, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: The Intellistation POWER 285? IBM Web Price for the lowest end model is $8,099: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/intellistation/power/hardware/285/browse.html If you want a decent dual-core model, list price is $14.074. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

Patrick Finnegan wrote: Yebbut, if you don't need the CATIA-grade graphics, a p5-52x with very nearly the same specs as the IntelliStation can be had for under $5K. Doc

On Tuesday 04 September 2007, Liam Proven wrote: I don't feel like looking this up. Go look at SPECfp numbers for PPC and POWER chips of the same era, for a starting point. There's also a number of POWER architecture descriptions floating around the internet which detail differences. The POWER4 is dual core, the original G5 is single core. The newest G5 is dual core. IBM didn't make ANY quad-core processors until the POWER5+. The POWER chips have a bunch of hypervisor goo, and many, many MBs of L3 cache on the multicore versions. I wasn't say it was without *any* cache. It just has a lot less than POWER4. No one builds modern processors without ANY cache, that'd just be silly. Why should I read those? That was the exact point I was trying to make. POWER5 and POWER6 have evolved quite a bit from where POWER4 was. IBM made a lot more money selling POWER processors, systems, and consulting to go with it, than they ever did with selling PPC chips to apple. IBM was dragging their feet with PPC features on the G5 (and whatever would have been G6), which is why Apple abandoned them; if IBM was making enough money from Apple on their G5s, I'm sure that they would have payed more attention to what Apple wanted (like low-power noteboot CPUs). Depends on what you mean by "affordable". Easily more affordable than an inflation-adjusted IBM 5150 or similar. Whether or not you need Flash is a matter of debate... but a lot of that can be handled by firefox, IBM's PPC JREs, and mplayer/xine. Who needs three separate media players, when you can use one of two OSS players, and play almost anything. I hear that the OSS flash player is even very close to being able to play youtube/google flash videos. But, alas, this still doesn't make a platform intersting to me. Who said personal/professional use? I though that people collected computers because they were "interesting", not just because they were useful. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

William Donzelli wrote: I can verify that no-one in Fishkill gave a damn. I was onsite when the announcement came. Peace... Sridhar

On 04/09/07, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote: Whoops! I'm sorry, you're absolutely right. I was getting my early versus my late models muddled up. I humbly apologise. Fair call. I think your phrasing was ambiguous, though: "it's still lacking some things, like cache." I have seen references to a cacheless Intel Celeron Ultra-Low-Voltage, but I can't find mention of it now. Well, because it makes points like this: "One of the MPF seminar attendees, David Wang of RWT, revealed some interesting information in a *very recent article* on the 970. Allow me to summarize: As it turns out, at some tasks the PPC 970 will actually outperform its big brother, the Power4, because the 970 is made to run at higher clock rates. Apparently, in order to increase the reliability of the Power4 for the high-end server market, IBM used much thicker gate oxides on the chip's transistors. The trade-off for this decreased failure rate and improved reliability was that the Power4's transistors have slower switching speeds, so even with process shrinks it's harder to push the design to higher clock speeds. Since the 970 is made for the desktop market, there's no need for such measures and therefore the new chip's clock speed will scale much higher than the Power4's. In sum, the 970 is made to be faster, cheaper, and significantly less reliable than the Power4. (Of course, when I say "significantly less reliable than the Power4," you have to understand that this puts the 970's product life and failure rate on par with other mainstream CPUs, since the Power4's increased gate oxide thickness makes it significantly more reliable than most mainstream CPUs.)" The *very recent article* is here: http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?AID=RWT101502203725 Which states that IBM, at the PPC970 launch, said: "In the case of the PowerPC 970, the processor does not need to meet similar reliability requirements as the POWER4 processor, and as a consequence, circuit and process technology can be tweaked to obtain higher performance by trading away the near-absolute reliability required by the POWER4 processor." In a somewhat theoretical sense, perhaps, yes. Right now, PowerPC is selling like never before, as it's the basis of the Xbox360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. It's shipping millions of units - maybe tens of millions. After their year or two in the sun, though, I think it might subside into something of a minority niche. About the only company even claiming to make personal computers based around PowerPC now are Amiga-compatibles. Amiga's products are vapourware, as far as I can tell. At least you can buy Genesi EFIKA boxes. They're years away from any of the state-of-the-art stuff we've been discussing, though. They're looking at well-sub-1GHz SoC processors. OK. Clearly we find very different things of relevance. I found PowerPC of interest because it was the Other Desktop Platform. It is no longer. Now, pretty much, the desktop is x86 from horizon to horizon, with a soupcon of ARM in a few low-power handheld and pocket devices. I think that's a damned shame. I personally use towers and notebooks. My clients, generally small businesses, use PCs and the occasional Mac. That means x86 all the way, with x86-64 starting to show on the horizon now. So what happens in big enterprise iron is of little direct import or interest to me. I daresay most do. Me, I don't collect it unless I have some *use* for it, even if that's just in theory. I have Atari machines I've never turned on, because I wanted to play with MINT and the like. Maybe one day I'll have time... -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

Dave McGuire wrote: Not all are, but they were available. Still are, if you want to get an IBM Bladecenter JS20. Just not in a Mac. I was going to say something to that effect. *sigh* I believe MVS is selling/running on a greater number of copies now than it ever has in the past. Also, in other messages in this thread, people have been saying stuff to the effect that pSeries and zSeries aren't architecturally all that different anymore. Anyone who says that hasn't used zSeries hardware. That would be like saying that the Tandem NonStop S is similar to the SGI Indigo^2 because they're both based on MIPS R4400. Or that the Cray T3E is similar to the Compaq Alphastation 1200 because they're both based on Alpha EV56. Hogwash. Peace... Sridhar

On 05/09/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote: They aren't now, as they're all Intel Core2 today. They were, though: http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g5-dual.html http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g5-quad.html It may well be, yes. But is it not more relevant to ask: [1] how large is its proportional market share now compared to 5, 10, 20, 30y ago? I don't have any figures, but I bet its %age of the market /now/ is tiny compared to in the 1970s. [2] how many new green-field deployments are happening? Well, it's a fair cop, I haven't. But then, this discussion at least started out as one about CPUs. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On 06/09/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote: Well, we could compare installs, or we could compare users. It's up to you. Either way, I'll warrant that its market share now is infinitisemal compared to what it once what. Even if they're shifting a million seats a year, which I really very much doubt, they're doing so in a market of hundreds of millions of users a year of other platforms. It's marginal. It may be high-margin, but it's a tiny drop in a big ocean. I think to describe a 33yo OS with a minute market share as a legacy system is a fair call, even if it is still in active development and being actively sold. All right, up to a point, yes. I've been watching the progress of Linux on S/390 and zSeries with some interest. I still don't reckon it's a very significant market share, and furthermore, every site running primarily or totally on Linux/390 is a site that's running less on actual IBM OSs. Indeed, tho' I don't know a lot about mainframes, I have a feeling that most Linux/390 is deployed on z/VM - which is to say, in an LPAR under VM - rather than under z/OS, which is to say, MVS. Linux is probably actually displacing MVS - z/OS - rather than helping it. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On 06/09/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote: All right, conceded. But I suspect that there is a user count involved somewhere for licensing purposes! Re your point about accessing a mainframe - that would generally be very indirectly, though, no? They access a web server or an ATM or something, that probably talks to another server, that talks to a mainframe. Most of the tedious IT management press that I read seems to consider the client/server model obsolete now and talks of at least 3-layer models instead. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On 06/09/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote: I am sure you're right. I've read lots about this myself. But from what I have read, it is not actually selling that many new mainframes. I've read figures of single-digit sales per year. It may be millions of US$ worth of business but it's not many actual systems. Indeed I think a fair bit of this sort of consolidation is happening by way of outsourcing to 3rd party datacentres - possibly on machines still owned by IBM. Yes, it's doing well. We are still not talking large volumes, though, by /any/ measure. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, William Donzelli wrote: Surely the worldwide market can't be much more than half a dozen :-)

William Donzelli wrote: One of the things I have in my pile is a Honeywell/Bull DPS9000. How many of those do you think are left? And yes, GCOS 8 machines are still being made too. Peace... Sridhar

Liam Proven wrote: Much, much more than single-digit sales per year. I can see them being shipped from just down the hall from my office. It's a lot more than single digits per year. Be careful with words like "any". Peace... Sridhar

On 07/09/07, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Good point, well made. (An IT journalist writes. One of the worst freelance commissions I ever had was a piece on "knowledge management". It's such an empty phrase...) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

Patrick Finnegan wrote: I suspect it's probably actually helping to sell z/OS too. z/OS does high-performance database work much better than Linux. Why have a separate database server and a separate web server when you can do both on the same machine and have them talk to each other over high-speed intra-machine links instead of much slower LAN or cluster interconnect hardware? Linux has definitely started to displace z/VSE though. There's a bit too much overlap. I have seen installation with all three (and sometimes even z/TPF and others) on the same machine for the same application systems. Peace... Sridhar

Liam Proven wrote: Yes. Without a doubt. But sales numbers are by no means the only measure of importance. If sales numbers were the only measure, then every mainframe would be replaced by a giant pile of PCs to take advantage of the economies of scale. They tried that and failed miserably. More people would be inconvenienced by the loss of, say, 5000 mainframes than by the loss of 5000 PCs. Peace... Sridhar

Liam Proven wrote: As it has been since roughly 1975. I'm really confused as to what point you're trying to make. If the point is that Dell sells a metric buttload more PC crap than IBM sells mainframes, I don't believe anyone disagrees. If the point is that zSeries or s/390 systems are obsolete, that point will never hold water. A very good analogy would be a comparison of passenger-car sales to diesel/electric locomotive sales. Trains have been around a hell of a lot longer than passenger cars, and they still do exactly what they've always done. And, for every locomotive engine sold today, there are likely millions of cars sold. Not only does that not prove that trains are obsolete, but the comparison is absolutely meaningless. In fact, the instance of z/OS compared to z/VM is going *up*, not down. Those "marginally interesting" p5 systems are scaling into the low-end LPAR market, while a lot of high-end work, especially in database ops, is scaling into the realm of single-image mainframes. I've been following both branches of this thread (zOS market share, and POWER vs 970FX), and I really have to ask: Do you have any actual experience with, first-hand knowledge of, or formal training in *any* of IBM's non-x86 server platforms? Because everyone who has replied to you, including myself, work with them daily. I'm probably the least knowledgeable, as I have very little experience with the mainframes and none at all with AS/400 or i5. My point is that Pat, Sridhar, William, and even I might know what we're talking about. Doc

How old is Unix now? Or Windows for that matter? -- Will

Liam Proven wrote: You need to get yourself an old mainframe and a new one and play with them to see the differences yourself. You'll never take my word for it. Peace... Sridhar

Feel the vibrations while chanting the mantra: Arrrrrrrrrr, Ayyyyyyy, Esssssss ! (that is all I have say about that). Feel the vibrations... -- Will

Patrick Finnegan wrote: Hell, we have designers using recent versions of CATIA on 10-year-old RS/6000s. Peace... Sridhar

Patrick Finnegan wrote: AIX is Not Unix. Not any more than OS X is Unix. I realize that AIX (and OS X 10.5) *is* UNIX, certified and trademarked, but trying to approach it as one would a traditional unix (HP/UX, Solaris, etc) is a recipe for heartbreak. It's an extremely robust operating system with a very nice POSIX API. Under the covers, it's its very own thing. Doc